Remington’s ambitious group includes five horses and four riders: two American cavalrymen, from the United States Regiment of Dragoons, and two Plains Indians. The Dragoons, who patrolled the land west of the Mississippi River, have closed in on the fleeing Indians, and the men are locked in hand-to-hand combat. While the soldiers’ uniforms, rifles, and accoutrements are historically correct for 1850, Remington’s Indians are closer in type to those he had known in the West in the 1880s and 1890s.